Eco-friendly furniture rises out of ashes

Patrick Langston, The Ottawa Citizen05.12.2011

Ken (left) and Kosta McKay are two brothers who run Furniture Affairs - a business in Ottawa that designs and builds eco-friendly furniture from discarded ash, reclaimed wood from the Ottawa River and other throw-away wood.Julie Oliver
/ The Ottawa Citizen

An example of one of Furniture Affairs' custom-built tables. Ken (left) and Kosta McKay are two brothers who run Furniture Affairs - a business in Ottawa that designs and builds eco-friendly furniture from discarded ash, reclaimed wood from the Ottawa River and other throw-away wood.Julie Oliver
/ The Ottawa Citizen

An example of one of Furniture Affairs' custom-built tables. Ken (left) and Kosta McKay are two brothers who run Furniture Affairs - a business in Ottawa that designs and builds eco-friendly furniture from discarded ash, reclaimed wood from the Ottawa River and other throw-away wood.Julie Oliver
/ The Ottawa Citizen

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OTTAWA — Thanks to the emerald ash borer, Ottawa is turning both less and more green at the same time.

The nasty insect, believed to have arrived in North America 20 years ago in wooden packaging material from eastern Asia, kills 100 per cent of the ash trees it invades unless the trees are inoculated every two years with a systemic insecticide. Each injection costs $150-$300. City of Ottawa crews have already cut down hundreds of trees in a rearguard effort to slow the spread of the invasion. Over the next 10 to 15 years, Ottawa is expected to lose about one quarter of our tree cover as the ashes die.

All of which will make the city a lot less green, at least in the summer.

But Ken and Kosta McKay are turning that arboreal disaster into a success story that blends environmental smarts with fine design.

The two brothers, partners in Furniture Affairs on Auriga Drive (www.furnitureaffairs.ca), are using ash salvaged from a cull of city trees to produce custom-made, eco-friendly furniture for both the residential and commercial markets.

Removing the outer inch from a cut, infected tree eliminates the insects and their larvae, leaving wood that’s safe for reuse. Otherwise, the wood winds up as mulch or biofuel. The infected material is ground into tiny pieces too small for the insects and then turned into compost.

“It makes beautiful furniture because it’s hard, and every piece of ash looks different,” says Ken. “It can be used for sofas, chairs, anything.” A glowing, six-foot-long dining room table with sturdy squared legs ($2,000) bears witness to the glory of ash furniture. Thanks to its locally sourced, salvaged wood, formaldehyde-free glue and a non-toxic tung oil finish, the table’s also a testament to how green furniture can be.

The backroom of the brothers’ workshop is already piled high with a small mountain of rough-cut ash planks from a city cull. The McKays hope that pile will continue to grow as a nascent Ottawa organization with the working name of the Urban Wood Alliance seeks an agreement with the city to process and distribute culled ash.

The brothers also use reclaimed wood from the Ottawa River. They buy it from another Ottawa success story: Logs End, which for several years has been pulling perfectly preserved logs from the floor of the Ottawa River, where they’ve been sitting since the days when the rivers, not trucks, were used to transport pulp wood from lumber camps to mills.

The day the Citizen dropped by their cozy workshop, the brothers were hurrying to finish a sprawling, 24-foot conference table made from reclaimed yellow birch. Built in three sections, it was destined for the executive board room of the new Ottawa Convention Centre — a nice coup for the brothers, and one that accords with design elements in the Convention Centre that celebrate the city’s lumbering history.

The pieces that come out of Furniture Affairs aren’t cheap, but they are made to last. Scratch a solid wood table top and you can always sand and refinish it.

Furniture made of MDF and covered with a veneer may sell for less, but is difficult to repair and often not worth the time or money — easier to junk it and buy another one (do that two or three times, and you would have been better to buy a decent piece in the first place).

“Planned obsolescence and impulse shopping: that’s what customers have to help stop,” says the soft-spoken Kosta, who designs the furniture. He also plays in a rock ‘n’ roll band by night while his older, married brother usually spends evenings with his growing family.

Ken, who rarely holds still for more than a few seconds, jumps in: “We’re trying to get everyone on a new business model of taking more care when they produce things and finding out where the raw materials come from … We can’t keep shipping wood to China to have cheap furniture made (there) and then having it shipped back here for distribution all over the place.”

The brothers’ green manufacturing mandate means they source as much as they can from within a 500-kilometre area around Ottawa. That gives business to local suppliers and helps cut greenhouse gases associated with transportation.

At 36, Kosta has long been an advocate of greener and better quality furniture. Before teaming up with his brother a few years back, he worked for upholstery and other companies. “I saw how badly things were being manufactured. I tried to convince them to change, but they didn’t care.”

Ken, 41, ran a number of startup firms before deciding that he, too, belonged in the furniture business. In 2008, he joined forces with his brother to establish Furniture Affairs.

Their father, also named Ken, is a veteran of the furniture business and now works with his sons. The company contracts out some aspects of production but hopes to eventually hire its own staff.

As a custom manufacturer, Furniture Affairs doesn’t keep much in stock. One piece that is present when we stop by is a Solo Chair. High-backed and deep-seated, the easy chair features arms made of ash and river-reclaimed birch, a solid ash frame, natural jute seat webbing, soy-based foam, and a non-PVC vinyl covering. It’s priced at $1,600 and comes with a 20-year warranty.

The brothers also repair, reupholster and recycle used furniture. Buy an item from them, for example, and they’ll remove your old piece for reconditioning and reuse, tear it down and recycle the components, or donate it to an organization like Habitat for Humanity’s Restore.

In an age of mass consumption and short-term thinking, buying custom green furniture that can be passed on to your grandchildren is at once a refreshingly new and reassuringly old-fashioned idea.

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